We’re thrilled to announce Docker 1.8 with support for image signing, a new installer, as well as incremental improvements to Engine, Compose, Swarm, Machine and Registry.

You’ve been telling us that you want Docker to be more extensible and composed of smaller, standalone components. We hear you loud and clear. In June, we announced our intention to release runC as a separate piece of plumbing. With this release we’re taking another step towards that goal. The system powering image signing has been implemented as a separate piece of plumbing called Notary, and volume plugins, an experimental feature in 1.7, has now been promoted to the stable release.
Across the board we’ve been making the usual quality improvements – something we know is important to all of you running Docker in production.

Docker Content Trust and The Update Framework (TUF)

Docker Content Trust is a new feature in Docker Engine 1.8 that makes it possible to verify the publisher of Docker images. When a publisher pushes an image to a remote registry, Docker signs the image with a private key. When you later pull this image, Docker uses the publisher’s public key to verify that the image you are about to run is exactly what the publisher created, has not been tampered with, and is up to date.

Docker Toolbox

Along with this release of Docker, we are also releasing a new installer for Mac OS X and Windows called Docker Toolbox.

Toolbox is the fastest way to get up and running with a Docker development environment. It installs the Docker client, Machine, Compose (Mac only for now) and VirtualBox – everything you need to get started.

In Engine 1.6 we added logging drivers so you could ship logs from containers directly to logging systems like syslogd. In this version we’re adding some more systems: GELF, Fluentd and a driver which will rotate your on-disk logs.

As well as these features, we’ve also got a few smaller things we think you’ll like:

• Copy files from host to container: docker cp used to only copy files from a container out to the host, but it now works the other way round: docker cp foo.txt mycontainer:/foo.txt

• Daemon command: Running the daemon is now done with a new docker daemon command instead of passing the -d flag, making it really clear which command-line options are for client (docker --help) and daemon (docker daemon --help).

• Customisable ps format:docker ps now takes a --format option which you can use to customise the output of the command.

• Configurable client config directory: The Docker client stores some config files in ~/.docker. In case you need to run multiple clients on a single machine, this is now configurable with --config and the DOCKER_CONFIG environment variable.

Docker Registry 2.1

Back in April, we released Registry 2.0 which debuted a new image format and architecture for better performance and faster image pulls. Today we’re releasing Registry 2.1, which is even faster, more secure and has a handful of new features:

• Listing repositories: You can now list the contents of your registry through the API.

• New storage drivers: In addition to Amazon S3 and Azure, images can now be stored in OpenStack Swift, Ceph Rados, and Aliyun OSS.

• Soft deletes: You can now use the API to remove the references to images and layers from your registry.

Orchestration Updates

Docker continues to get better at orchestrating distributed apps with updates to Compose, Swarm and Machine. This is what’s new in Compose 1.4:

• Dramatically faster: You should find that your apps start and stop much, much faster. Compose will now only recreate containers where needed, and will perform operations in parallel where possible.
• Custom container names: You can now pass the container_name option in your Compose file to give a service’s container a specific name.
• Read config from stdin: Compose can now read configs from stdin so you can automatically generate them:

Machine 0.4 is now included in Toolbox as the default, recommended way to set up a Docker development environment. In this version there is support for configuring the Engine for HTTP proxies, as well as a heap of other little things. Check out the full release notes, and download Toolbox to try out Machine.

Swarm 0.4 is all about stability and quality. It has a bunch of improvements to the built-in scheduler as well as improvements to the Mesos driver so you can use Docker tools to control a Mesos cluster. Check out the release notes for full details, and the getting started instructions to get up and running with Swarm.

[…] that would allow users to create and manage persistent Docker volumes. With last week’s release of Docker 1.8, which now officially supports Docker volume drivers, I am excited to announce Convoy, an […]